Davies High School students take to the air for Shakespeare tale

The Davies High School junior plays Titania, the queen of the fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“You get to fly! You get to be a fairy!” she said Saturday after a 20-minute bout of flying about the stage.

What’s not to like about that?

While other students have enjoyed a long spring break, it’s been a week of flight training for Montgomery and the rest of the cast and crew – be they sprites or human counterweights. And the training goes on until the show goes on March 15.

Davies fine arts boosters raised about $10,000 to hire ZFX Flying Effects to come in with harnesses, cabling and a trainer to make defying gravity for Shakespeare’s comedy look graceful rather than a stage-cratering experience.

“We’ve been having a great time,” said Sandy Harned, the trainer from Louisville, Ky.-based ZFX.

Harned has trained the group in the choreography needed not just onstage but behind the scenes, as stagehands and a few beefier adults jump off ladders and set extensions or dance around each other while hauling on ropes.

The actors are moved by a pendulum system of pulleys and cables, she said. “It’s a physics lesson to use them,” Harned said.